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154.
Gay Community Pamphlets #1-6 (all published?), produced by Hop Brook, a separatist gay male commune founded on land near New Salem, Massachussetts in the early-mid 1970s.
4to. Printed on different colour paper, stapled together at top left corner.
i) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 1, #1 (1975). 4pp. leaflet printing an imaginary interview between David (Wetherbee) of Hop Brook Commune and Rohit Mehta, author of 'The Nameless Experience', a work on Krishnamurti.
ii) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 1, #2 (1975) - "Rural Gay Commune", a double-sided sheet outlining the commune's policies on membership ("we only live with people who we get off on… we are as much or as little guilty of ageism, uglyism, fatism, ismism as you who read this"; rules ("We have no rules… We don't want this commune to be a crash pad - a homosexual motel…"); and recommended reading ('Great Gay in the Morning' [item #111] and Krishnamurti).
iii) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 1, #3 (1975). Double-sided sheet titled "Walt Whitman's Calamus: A Gay-National Flower", featuring a "herb of the week" subscription programme that includes 52 different plant seeds with planting instructions and accompanying education packet per year. The commune members found inspiration in Walt Whitman and renamed their road 'Walt Whitman Way', as well as growing calamus plants to sell in his honour.
iv) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 2, #1 (1976). Two double-sided sheets (4pp.), titled "Living in a rural gay male collective (Hop Brook)". Prints quotes from Henry David Thoreau, John Stahle, Krishnamurti, and David Cooper, followed by a discussion of "everyday problems of living in a rural gay male collective… Let's examine the following logic: A. Anarchy is not chaos. B. Fairies are not all angels. C. We've already been through about a dozen bad trips at least a dozen times - so why go through them again?".
v) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 2, #2 (1976). Single-sided sheet printing an "Invitation to form an International Gay-Youth Shelters League (Y-Y)", where "gay means homosexual", "youth means new-age: jugend, juventude, jeunesse" and "shelter means gasthaus, albergue, auberge, hostel".
vi) Gay Community Pamphlets Vol. 2, #3 (1976). Double-sided sheet printing a text by David (Wetherbee) on "the idealistic hypocrisy in the gay movement". All six issues gathered together by three staples to top left corner; very faint central horizontal crease; o/w Very Good plus.
A rare, possibly complete run of Hop Brook's self-produced publication, with most issues, if not all, written by David Wetherbee (an ornithologist who later became a student of the history and natural history of New Salem). The nine-member commune lived in a large farmhouse on thirty-one acres and saw themselves as an anarchistic alternative to "gay subcultures", which they viewed as objectifying. They described themselves in an ad placed by Hop Brook in RFD (a magazine for gay country-living and alternative lifestyles): "We share most of the values that you would expect from an alternative society - steering clear of consumerism, commercialism, T.V., A.M., affection, competition, intellectualized bullshit, egoism, role-playing, meritocracy and the rest of that bourgeois. We are multi-uni-racial. WE RECOGNIZE NOT LESS THAN ONE SEX AMONG HUMAN BEINGS."
